"True wisdom, as the fruit of self-examination, dialogue and generous encounter between persons, is not acquired by a mere accumulation of data which eventually leads to overload and confusion, a sort of mental pollution. Real relationships with others, with all the challenges they entail, now tend to be replaced by a type of internet communication which enables us to choose or eliminate relationships at whim, thus giving rise to a new type of contrived emotion which has more to do with devices and displays than with other people and with nature. Today’s media do enable us to communicate and to share our knowledge and affections. Yet at times they also shield us from direct contact with the pain, the fears and the joys of others and the complexity of their personal experiences. For this reason, we should be concerned that, alongside the exciting possibilities offered by these media, adeep and melancholic dissatisfaction with interpersonal relations, or a harmful sense of isolation, can also arise." (Pope Francis, Laudato Si’, #47.)

Reflections-2013

"Shaping the Papacy in a Changing World" From John Paul II to Pope Francis

The Tablet Lecture 2013 by Robert Mickens

Robert Mickens has been The Tablet's Rome correspondent from 2001 to 2003 and from 2005 to the present and writer of the paper's popular weekly column, "Letter from Rome". He is regularly featured as a Vatican-affairs analyst for the BBC in Great Britain, ABC in Australia and National Public Radio in the United States. View

A Tribute to and Reflection on David Herbert

David Leonard Herbert was a brilliant radiologist. He died of cancer at the age of 70. His funeral service was held in Port Macquarie where he had worked in private practice for more than 25 y. He leaves his wife Della - they were married in 1969 - and four children, Joanne, , Elissa, David Jnr and Ceci. The following is the text of Michael Whelan's sermon at the funeral service on Friday December 13 2013.

Adrian van Kaam (1920-2007) - Some Reflections

Adrian van Kaam

Adrian van Kaam was born in The Hague, The Netherlands, on April 19 1920. He died in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania USA, on November 17 2007. As a young man he was ordained a Catholic priest in the Congregation of the Holy Spirit (Spiritans). During the Second Wrold War, he was involved in the Dutch resistance. Associating closley in the resistance with many different types of people, some believers some not, some Catholics some not, van Kaam came to see the importance of what he was later to call the universal human dimension. The foundational question that can be seen in his pioneering academic career was most simply, What does it mean to be a human being?

Communication at its Best is Communion

Thomas Merton

"And so I stand among you as one who offers a small message of hope, that first, there are always people who dare to seek on the margin of society, who are not dependent on social acceptance, not dependent on social routine, and prefer a kind of free-floating existence under a state of risk.

Wealth Distribution in the USA

The Courage to Speak

What's Happening?

The Common Enemy

Karl Menninger

It is difficult to know just how to designate our common enemy for rhetorical purposes of a presentation such as this. Evil goes by one name in a course on philosophy, by another name in the chemical laboratory, or the law court, or the church lobby, or the seminar on ego psychology in the psychoanalytic in­stitute. Evil is one thing in France and another thing in the Congo ‑ or is it? Maybe the best word, after all, is "The Devil". It is a curious thing that some people get around to believing in God by way of first discovering the Devil. Faced with the undeniable existence of the latter, they go on to find his adversary.

Self-righteousness

Herbert Butterfield

It is easy for us to fall into imagining that life and the course of history are spoiled only by the activity of the extraordinarily wicked. The role of these latter tends to be magnified because evil is regarded as a sort of deus ex machina ‑ not really belonging to this world ‑ the culprit not worthy to be reckoned with the rest of human nature...